Monday, September 26, 2011

We are just momentary stopping points on life's grand 3.6billion year old journey of exhuberant and horrific creativity. The urge to sex is THAT old, we really have no choice in the matter(and if we had complete choice, i'd wager that our branch of life would come to a dead end). When we start juicing and desiring sex, it's our protoplasm's way of taking us along on its 3.6billion year old joyride and we really don't have much say in the matter.

Through sex this ancient journey of life EXPERIMENTs with our children as would an artist, and like any artist, life ends up throwing away many possibilities in the trash heap. To create involves risk, the risk to produce nonsense, and indeed many of the gametes you and i produce are nonsense and not viable, and many conceptions turn out to be grotesque nonsense to be expelled before the mother even knows she is pregnant, and even after birth... there is no guarantee that our child won't have 3 arms or no trachea or only half a brain and live for only a week...

And either way we eventually die. Some, if they are lucky, peacefully, but for many it is harrowing for them and their loved ones.

It is not an easy situation to take, that human suffering is the price we pay so that we can be part of this immensely creative show. Let's face it: most people aren't terribly interested in creativity.

Most certainly are not interested that Life has come up with over a million different colorful and surprising ways to say insect (and i'm not sure how many religious people would respond if it was pointed out to them: god likes beetles, 600,000 different kinds! or worms for that matter... I suppose many might think it is Satan's work...) Or even closer to home, that we share this creative show with dirty smelly noisy Gorillas, Chimpansees, Bonobos, Orangutans, and Gibbons (not to mention all those puzzling fossils suggesting that there were quite a variety of us human-like critters on earth some time ago), or even god forbid, gays and negroes...

Anyway, when humanity collectively woke up to this reality, that their intensely experienced personal lives are encased in bodies that are seemingly made of featureless 'meat', When humans realized that they could dream of infinity, and imagine whole Kosmoses inside their heads and yet were imprisoned in bodies that would decay horribly and in the end limit them to finite lives - humanity rebelled and created the story of a grand drama of a benign eternal father (not mother, she would fear childbirth as possibly dangeous and anyway could threaten to abort...) who has a carefull plan for us, that we are not merely contingent whims of a grand evolutionary game, but that we are children of a father who desired to create precisely us and loves us and has put us here in these flesh prisons for...

That part is confusing, the repulsion to being flesh was so intense that, well, perhaps like many children, we continued to wish to believe that our parents were perfect and that we were being punnished because it was our fault. As it is for young children, to have entertained the possibility that our 'parents' were not perfect, that there is no plan to it all... was too dizzying a prospect to take in. When we first woke up to all this awareness, we had very little experience of what our powers were as humans, and probably had no confidence that we could stand on our own two feet in a world of exhuberant and chaotic creativity and destructivity.

So most of us still choose to hide behind our imagined parents' aprons. And the dominant Stories we created (most mythologies and religions) are our responses to this situation.

It will be a long road ahead of us. The courage it takes to accept as our role to be, each one of us, in some sense alone, our own masters in this chaotic storm of creativity, that each of us is at the cutting edge of this creativity, responsible for playing our part in this vast game of evolution (which means that many will fail, sometimes miserably), is not easy.

There is hope. I would look at the stories of Buddhism, Judaism and science... but i suppose that will have to wait for the next installment!